Adnan Syed: Maryland: (Serial): Major (Unwelcome) Development: From our 'When procedure gets in the way of justice' department: The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Friday that his conviction of Adnan Syed should be reinstated because procedural errors in how his conviction had been wiped away in 2022, CNN (Reporters Tierney Sneed and Devan Cole) reports…"The ruling is the latest twist in the legal saga made famous by the podcast “Serial,” which examined the investigation that led to the 2000 conviction of Syed for the murder of Hae Min Lee. On Friday, the state’s highest court agreed with an appeals court decision that said the rights of Lee’s family were violated because her brother Young Lee received inadequate notice of a 2022 hearing on the state’s efforts to vacate the case and was not afforded opportunities to fully participate in the hearing."…"In two separate dissents, three members of the Maryland Supreme Court expressed disagreement with the majority’s decision to reinstate the conviction. Writing in one, Judge Michele Hotten said that under Maryland law, Young Lee “had no right to be heard at the vacatur hearing.” ”The circuit court is not statutorily required to hear from a victim or victim’s representative during vacatur proceedings because those proceedings no longer concern punishing the criminal defendant; rather, those proceedings concern the very basis of the criminal defendant’s guilt — conviction,” she wrote in the dissent."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "The ruling will restart the efforts to clear away Syed’s conviction from the point that the 2022 motion to vacate the conviction was filed by Maryland state’s attorney’s office. At the time, prosecutors said that they had uncovered evidence related to one of the other suspects in the case. The reinvestigation of the case revealed evidence about the possible involvement of two suspects other than Syed, including a person who said they would make Lee “disappear” and that “he would kill her,” prosecutors previously said. Syed’s attorneys said he and his legal team were unaware that information existed until 2022. Syed’s conviction gained renewed — and widespread — attention nearly 10 years ago after the “Serial” podcast dug into his case, raising questions about the conviction and his legal representation. In doing so, the podcast reached a huge audience and set off a true-crime podcasting boom as well as further examinations of the case, including the HBO docuseries, “The Case Against Adnan Syed.”

------------------------------------------------------

STORY: "Conviction of Adnan Syed from ‘Serial’ podcast should be reinstated, Maryland Supreme Court says," by  Tierney Sneed and Devan Cole,  published by CNN, on Friday, August 30, 2024…(Devan Cole covers the U.S. Supreme Court, Lower Federal Courts and the Justice Department);

PHOTO CAPTION: "Adnan Syed, whose case was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial,” exits the courthouse after a judge overturned Syed's 2000 murder conviction and ordered a new trial during a hearing at the Baltimore City Circuit Courthouse on September 19, 2022. 

GIST: "The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Friday that the conviction of Adnan Syed should be reinstated because of procedural errors in how Syed’s conviction had been wiped away in 2022.

The ruling is the latest twist in the legal saga made famous by the podcast “Serial,” which examined the investigation that led to the 2000 conviction of Syed for the murder of Hae Min Lee.

On Friday, the state’s highest court agreed with an appeals court decision that said the rights of Lee’s family were violated because her brother Young Lee received inadequate notice of a 2022 hearing on the state’s efforts to vacate the case and was not afforded opportunities to fully participate in the hearing.

“In an effort to remedy what they perceived to be an injustice to Mr. Syed, the prosecutor and the circuit court worked an injustice against Mr. Lee by failing to treat him with dignity, respect, and sensitivity and, in particular, by violating Mr. Lee’s rights as a crime victim’s representative to reasonable notice of the Vacatur Hearing, the right to attend the hearing in person, and the right to be heard on the merits of the Vacatur Motion,” the Maryland Supreme Court said in the 4-3 decision.

The ruling will restart the efforts to clear away Syed’s conviction from the point that the 2022 motion to vacate the conviction was filed by Maryland state’s attorney’s office.

At the time, prosecutors said that they had uncovered evidence related to one of the other suspects in the case.

The reinvestigation of the case revealed evidence about the possible involvement of two suspects other than Syed, including a person who said they would make Lee “disappear” and that “he would kill her,” prosecutors previously said.

Syed’s attorneys said he and his legal team were unaware that information existed until 2022.

Syed’s conviction gained renewed — and widespread — attention nearly 10 years ago after the “Serial” podcast dug into his case, raising questions about the conviction and his legal representation. In doing so, the podcast reached a huge audience and set off a true-crime podcasting boom as well as further examinations of the case, including the HBO docuseries, “The Case Against Adnan Syed.”

In two separate dissents, three members of the Maryland Supreme Court expressed disagreement with the majority’s decision to reinstate the conviction.

Writing in one, Judge Michele Hotten said that under Maryland law, Young Lee “had no right to be heard at the vacatur hearing.”

”The circuit court is not statutorily required to hear from a victim or victim’s representative during vacatur proceedings because those proceedings no longer concern punishing the criminal defendant; rather, those proceedings concern the very basis of the criminal defendant’s guilt — conviction,” she wrote in the dissent.

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/30/politics/adnan-syed-conviction-reinstated-maryland-supreme-court/index.html

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic"  section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.

• SEE BREAKDOWN OF  SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG,  AT THE LINK BELOW:  HL:
  
  
  https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
  
  ———————————————————————————————
  
  FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
  Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
  Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
  
  —————————————————————————————————
  FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
  
  
  Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Technology: From our 'What could go wrong' department? Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports," the Associated Press (Reporters Sean Murphy and Matt O'brien) reports. But questions abound: Will they hold up in court, and will they reinforce society's racial biases and prejudices?…"AI technology is not new to police agencies, which have adopted algorithmic tools to read license plates, recognize suspects’ faces, detect gunshot sounds and predict where crimes might occur. Many of those applications have come with privacy and civil rights concerns and attempts by legislators to set safeguards. But the introduction of AI-generated police reports is so new that there are few, if any, guardrails guiding their use. Concerns about society’s racial biases and prejudices getting built into AI technology are just part of what Oklahoma City community activist aurelius francisco finds “deeply troubling” about the new tool, which he learned about from The Associated Press. “The fact that the technology is being used by the same company that provides Tasers to the department is alarming enough,” said francisco, a co-founder of the Foundation for Liberating Minds in Oklahoma City. He said automating those reports will “ease the police’s ability to harass, surveil and inflict violence on community members. While making the cop’s job easier, it makes Black and brown people’s lives harder.”

PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "Axon won’t say how many police departments are using the technology. It’s not the only vendor, with startups like Policereports.ai and Truleo pitching similar products. But given Axon’s deep relationship with police departments that buy its Tasers and body cameras, experts and police officials expect AI-generated reports to become more ubiquitous in the coming months and years. Before that happens, legal scholar Andrew Ferguson would like to see more of a public discussion about the benefits and potential harms. For one thing, the large language models behind AI chatbots are prone to making up false information, a problem known as hallucination that could add convincing and hard-to-notice falsehoods into a police report. “I am concerned that automation and the ease of the technology would cause police officers to be sort of less careful with their writing,” said Ferguson, a law professor at American University working on what’s expected to be the first law review article on the emerging technology. Ferguson said a police report is important in determining whether an officer’s suspicion “justifies someone’s loss of liberty.” It’s sometimes the only testimony a judge sees, especially for misdemeanor crimes. Human-generated police reports also have flaws, Ferguson said, but it’s an open question as to which is more reliable."

---------------------------------------------------

STORY: "Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports. Will they hold up in court?", by Associated Press reporters Sean Murphy and Matt O'brien, published by Halifax City News, on August 26, 2024.

PHOTO CAPTION: "Captain Jason Bussert demonstrates Draft One, an AI powered software that creates police reports from body cam audio, at Oklahoma City police headquarters on Friday, May 31, 2024 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. (AP Photo/Nick Oxford)

GIST: "Oklahoma City|): " A body camera captured every word and bark uttered as police Sgt. Matt Gilmore and his K-9 dog, Gunner, searched for a group of suspects for nearly an hour.

Normally, the Oklahoma City police sergeant would grab his laptop and spend another 30 to 45 minutes writing up a report about the search. But this time he had artificial intelligence write the first draft.

Pulling from all the sounds and radio chatter picked up by the microphone attached to Gilbert’s body camera, the AI tool churned out a report in eight seconds.

“It was a better report than I could have ever written, and it was 100% accurate. It flowed better,” Gilbert said. It even documented a fact he didn’t remember hearing — another officer’s mention of the color of the car the suspects ran from.

Oklahoma City’s police department is one of a handful to experiment with AI chatbots to produce the first drafts of incident reports. Police officers who’ve tried it are enthused about the time-saving technology, while some prosecutors, police watchdogs and legal scholars have concerns about how it could alter a fundamental document in the criminal justice system that plays a role in who gets prosecuted or imprisoned.

Built with the same technology as ChatGPT and sold by Axon, best known for developing the Taser and as the dominant U.S. supplier of body cameras, it could become what Gilbert describes as another “game changer” for police work.

“They become police officers because they want to do police work, and spending half their day doing data entry is just a tedious part of the job that they hate,” said Axon’s founder and CEO Rick Smith, describing the new AI product — called Draft One — as having the “most positive reaction” of any product the company has introduced.

“Now, there’s certainly concerns,” Smith added. In particular, he said district attorneys prosecuting a criminal case want to be sure that police officers — not solely an AI chatbot — are responsible for authoring their reports because they may have to testify in court about what they witnessed.

“They never want to get an officer on the stand who says, well, ‘The AI wrote that, I didn’t,’” Smith said.

AI technology is not new to police agencies, which have adopted algorithmic tools to read license plates, recognize suspects’ faces, detect gunshot sounds and predict where crimes might occur. Many of those applications have come with privacy and civil rights concerns and attempts by legislators to set safeguards. But the introduction of AI-generated police reports is so new that there are few, if any, guardrails guiding their use.

Concerns about society’s racial biases and prejudices getting built into AI technology are just part of what Oklahoma City community activist aurelius francisco finds “deeply troubling” about the new tool, which he learned about from The Associated Press.

“The fact that the technology is being used by the same company that provides Tasers to the department is alarming enough,” said francisco, a co-founder of the Foundation for Liberating Minds in Oklahoma City.

He said automating those reports will “ease the police’s ability to harass, surveil and inflict violence on community members. While making the cop’s job easier, it makes Black and brown people’s lives harder.”

Before trying out the tool in Oklahoma City, police officials showed it to local prosecutors who advised some caution before using it on high-stakes criminal cases. For now, it’s only used for minor incident reports that don’t lead to someone getting arrested.

“So no arrests, no felonies, no violent crimes,” said Oklahoma City police Capt. Jason Bussert, who handles information technology for the 1,170-officer department.

That’s not the case in another city, Lafayette, Indiana, where Police Chief Scott Galloway told the AP that all of his officers can use Draft One on any kind of case and it’s been “incredibly popular” since the pilot began earlier this year.

Or in Fort Collins, Colorado, where police Sgt. Robert Younger said officers are free to use it on any type of report, though they discovered it doesn’t work well on patrols of the city’s downtown bar district because of an “overwhelming amount of noise.”

Along with using AI to analyze and summarize the audio recording, Axon experimented with computer vision to summarize what’s “seen” in the video footage, before quickly realizing that the technology was not ready.

“Given all the sensitivities around policing, around race and other identities of people involved, that’s an area where I think we’re going to have to do some real work before we would introduce it,” said Smith, the Axon CEO, describing some of the tested responses as not “overtly racist” but insensitive in other ways.

Those experiments led Axon to focus squarely on audio in the product unveiled in April during its annual company conference for police officials.

The technology relies on the same generative AI model that powers ChatGPT, made by San Francisco-based OpenAI. OpenAI is a close business partner with Microsoft, which is Axon’s cloud computing provider.

“We use the same underlying technology as ChatGPT, but we have access to more knobs and dials than an actual ChatGPT user would have,” said Noah Spitzer-Williams, who manages Axon’s AI products. Turning down the “creativity dial” helps the model stick to facts so that it “doesn’t embellish or hallucinate in the same ways that you would find if you were just using ChatGPT on its own,” he said.

Axon won’t say how many police departments are using the technology. It’s not the only vendor, with startups like Policereports.ai and Truleo pitching similar products. But given Axon’s deep relationship with police departments that buy its Tasers and body cameras, experts and police officials expect AI-generated reports to become more ubiquitous in the coming months and years.

Before that happens, legal scholar Andrew Ferguson would like to see more of a public discussion about the benefits and potential harms. For one thing, the large language models behind AI chatbots are prone to making up false information, a problem known as hallucination that could add convincing and hard-to-notice falsehoods into a police report.

“I am concerned that automation and the ease of the technology would cause police officers to be sort of less careful with their writing,” said Ferguson, a law professor at American University working on what’s expected to be the first law review article on the emerging technology.

Ferguson said a police report is important in determining whether an officer’s suspicion “justifies someone’s loss of liberty.” It’s sometimes the only testimony a judge sees, especially for misdemeanor crimes.

Human-generated police reports also have flaws, Ferguson said, but it’s an open question as to which is more reliable.

For some officers who’ve tried it, it is already changing how they respond to a reported crime. They’re narrating what’s happening so the camera better captures what they’d want to put in writing.

As the technology catches on, Bussert expects officers will become “more and more verbal” in describing what’s in front of them.

After Bussert loaded the video of a traffic stop into the system and pressed a button, the program produced a narrative-style report in conversational language that included dates and times, just like an officer would have typed from his notes, all based on audio from the body camera.

“It was literally seconds,” Gilmore said, “and it was done to the point where I was like, ‘I don’t have anything to change.’”

At the end of the report, the officer must click a box that indicates it was generated with the use of AI."

The entire story can be read at:

https://halifax.citynews.ca/2024/08/26/police-officers-are-starting-to-use-ai-chatbots-to-write-crime-reports-will-they-hold-up-in-court/

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic"  section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.

• SEE BREAKDOWN OF  SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG,  AT THE LINK BELOW:  HL:
  
  
  https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
  
  ———————————————————————————————
  
  FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
  Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
  Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
  
  —————————————————————————————————
  FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
  
  
  Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

'No Body' Cases: (Australia): News.com (Reporter Megan Palin) reports on how a spate of "no body murder convictions has prompted calls for a shake up of Australia's legal system…'Networked knowledge' Media Report..."Criminal lawyer Barbara Etter — who represents (Susan) Neill-Fraser — told news.com.au Australia’s legal system was in need of a shake up. She said “right to appeal” provisions were inconsistent in Australia and that an independent Criminal Cases Review Commission, similar to one in the UK, needed to be introduced. “New Innocence Projects are emerging here in Australia, but appealing a murder conviction, particularly after normal appeal avenues have failed, continues to be a David v Goliath battle,” Ms Etter said. In circumstances where appeals have been exhausted and “fresh and compelling evidence emerges”, the only way to get the matter back in court, in most cases, is to appeal to the executive under a petition for mercy. “That can be problematic and not as transparent,” Ms Etter said. "

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The Shark Arm Case in 1935 is known as probably the first in which someone was charged with murder without a body, the Daily Telegraph reported.  In this case, there was only the arm of the victim vomited up by a 4m tiger shark held in Coogee Aquarium Baths. It had been cut off, not bitten, and fingerprints identified it as having belonged to SP bookie James Smith. His best friend Patrick Brady was charged with murder, but the only evidence the prosecutor could present to the jury was that Smith was last seen drinking with Brady at a Cronulla pub and that he had told police a stack of lies about his whereabouts and movements. The judge directed the jury to acquit."

--------------------------------------------------

NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE  MEDIA REPORT:  (This page set up by Dr Robert N. Moles;)

GIST: "On 2 March 2016 News.com reported ‘No body’ murder convictions prompt calls for shake up of Australia’s legal system. (Megan Palin: "A spate of "no body murder convictions' prompted calls for a shake up of Australia's legal system.)

No body. None of that matters when it comes to a “no body” murder conviction if the offender’s guilt can be determined by circumstantial or forensic evidence.

But the nature of the conviction doesn’t come without controversy and has

significantly contributed to the emergence of innocence projects in Australia.

The parents of murderer Keli Lane appeared on 60 Minutes on Sunday to speak publicly for the first time, about what they said was their daughter’s wrong conviction. 

Lane was convicted of murdering her two-day-old baby daughter within hours of leaving hospital in 1996.

She secretly gave birth to three babies, adopted two of them out and told police she gave Tegan to her natural father, Andrew Morris or Norris, who police found did not exist.

Tegan’s body has never been found. 

The family’s story is one of many relating to high profile ‘no body convictions’ in Australia.

In 2010, Susan Blyth Neill-Fraser was jailed for life in Hobart for the murder of her de facto partner of 18 years, Bob Chappell.

 Chappell, 65, was about to retire as the Royal Hobart Hospital’s chief radiation physicist when he went missing from the couple’s yacht Four

Winds while sailing off Hobart on Australia Day 2009. 

The judge said Neill-Fraser killed him for money.

 She was jailed for 26 years with an 18-year non-parole period. 

Chappell’s body has never been found and Neill-Fraser maintains her innocence.

Criminal lawyer Barbara Etter — who represents Neill-Fraser — told news.com.au

Australia’s legal system was in need of a shake up. 

She said “right to appeal” provisions were inconsistent in Australia and that an independent Criminal Cases Review Commission, similar to one in the UK, needed to be introduced.

 “New Innocence Projects are emerging here in Australia, but appealing a murder conviction, particularly after normal appeal avenues have failed, continues to be a David v Goliath battle,” Ms Etter said.

In circumstances where appeals have been exhausted and “fresh and compelling evidence emerges”, the only way to get the matter back in court, in most cases, is to appeal to the executive under a petition for mercy.

 “That can be problematic and not as transparent,” Ms Etter said. 

NSW, “unlike South Australia and Tasmania”, does not have legislation that

allows for a second or subsequent appeal where there is fresh and compelling evidence, according to Ms Etter.

“It would seem that there would be benefit in having some consistency in the current appeal provisions throughout Australia,” she said. 

Ms Etter said there was a growing concern about miscarriage of justice cases because of an increase of exonerations in the US and public debate surrounding the US case of Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, who

featured on the Netflix docu-series Making a Murderer. 

She said Australia needed “to look at other mechanisms to enable those who may have been wrongfully convicted to get their matters back before the court in a reasonable time frame”.

Lindy Chamberlain was at the centre of what is arguably Australia’s most famous ‘no body conviction’ case. 

Chamberlain was jailed for the murder of her infant daughter, Azaria, and later acquitted when evidence was found that proved her story about a dingo taking her baby.

Chamberlain is believed to be the only person convicted of a murder without a body to have their conviction overturned.

The Shark Arm Case in 1935 is known as probably the first in which someone was charged with murder without a body, the Daily Telegraph reported.

 In this case, there was only the arm of the victim vomited up by a 4m tiger shark held in Coogee Aquarium Baths.

It had been cut off, not bitten, and fingerprints identified it as having belonged to SP bookie James Smith.

His best friend Patrick Brady was charged with murder, but the only evidence the prosecutor could present to the jury was that Smith was last seen drinking with Brady at a Cronulla pub and that he had told police a stack of lies about his whereabouts and movements.

 The judge directed the jury to acquit. 

Brady has since died.

Other cases of ‘no body convictions’ where the bodies are still missing:

Convicted: Bradley John Murdoch. Victim: Peter Falconio. 

British tourist Peter Falconio, 28, disappeared in 2001 while driving with girlfriend Joanne Lees in their Kombi van on the Stuart Highway near Barrow Creek in the Northern Territory. Lees said they were flagged down by a man who shot Peter dead and kidnapped her before she escaped. 

Murdoch, 52, was convicted in 2006 and jailed for life. Falconio’s body has never been found. 

The case inspired the movie Wolf Creek.

Convicted: Paul Wilkinson. Victim: Kylie Labouchardiere. Labouchardiere, 23, arrived in Sydney with two packed suitcases for what she thought would be a new life with her married lover Paul Wilkinson.

 Instead of leaving his wife, Wilkinson, 34, murdered Kylie in April 2004 and later tried to cover his tracks by burning down the rental house he shared with his

wife.

 He was jailed last year for 28 years, with a minimum 24. Kylie’s body has never been found.

Convicted: Sudo Cavkic, Costas Athanasi and Julian Michael Clarke. Victim: Keith William Allan. Cavkic, Athanasi and Clarke were found guilty in 2007, after a third trial, of the contract killing of Allan, 53, who disappeared in May 2000.

 Clarke, a law clerk in Allan’s Avondale Heights office, took up to $560,000 from a trust account to finance his gambling and that of his partner and another associate. 

To stop Allan finding out, he procured Athanasi to recruit a killer, and Cavkic was brought in. Allan’s body has never been found.

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/no-body-murder-convictions-prompt-calls-for-shake-up-of-australias-legal-system/news-

story/d19968b5c570d5e01a412663cba82215

The entire Media Report can be read at:

http://netk.net.au/NSW/NSW28.pdf

———————————————————————————

("Megan Palin is an award-winning Australian journalist and US Correspondent based in New York. She has covered stories ranging from the 2020 US presidential election and the coronavirus pandemic to the Harvey Weinstein trial and the Lindt Cafe siege Inquest. Megan was highly commended as Journalist of the Year at the national Mumbrella Publish Awards for leading investigations into Australian Federal Police suicides; human trafficking in the US; and for an expose on a serial rapist. She also won a News Feature Writer of the Year award and was a national finalist for Outstanding News reporting.")

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic"  section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.

• SEE BREAKDOWN OF  SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG,  AT THE LINK BELOW:  HL:
  
  
  https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
  
  ———————————————————————————————
  
  FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
  Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
  Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
  
  —————————————————————————————————
  FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
  
  
  Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;

---------------------------------------------------